On Wings of Desire

If Lent is to be a time of unwrinkling, of standing to our full height, of growing toward the light of our deepest desire, how do we come to know its source?  Our deepest desire is always within us, speaking n a voice quiet beneath the din of our lives. The certainly of its sound is so strong that even in its quiet we can hear it, hear the elements of the din in resonance with its pitch, hear those that are dissonant with IT. The daily Examen gives us the opportunity to learn to hear this resonance, this harmony. Would you like to experience the difference between this interior harmony and dissonance?
Please do this. You will understand. Put your hands like the ones in the photo. Notice that one of your thumbs – right or left – naturally ends up on top. Switch thumbs, so that the other one is on top. How does it feel? Strange? Uncomfortable? Weird? Now switch back to the way that happened naturally, the way that happens to be right for you. Feels better, doesn’t it? Switch back and forth. You are feeling dissonance and resonance, conflict and harmony. If you put the “wrong” thumb on top and slowly switch to the “natural” one, at a certain point as you approach the “natural” position, you may feel the Ahhhh that comes, like Quaker song that suggests “’twill be our delight when by turning, turning we come ‘round right.” The thumb technique is something that in just a moment demonstrates this delight on the surface. The Examen (click for a link) invites us to feel this delight in a deeper way.  Don’t let the word “God” distract you, or the “religious” language. Look at the five simple steps as Presence, Gratefulness, Clarity, Review, and Conversation. Presence is simply focus, centering our attention. Gratefulness relaxes us. Anything for which we are grateful – the sweetness of our tea, the feeling of warm water on our hands and face are examples of this. It need not be some major experience. Clarity moves us to ask. Ask who, if not God? Our inner self, perhaps, our conscience, our Jiminy Cricket? We all have one. And now the review. What happened today? It will take some energy to recall even these last 16 hours! But one by one, the memories will come. Each experience, when we recall it, will have some resonance or dissonance, a little or a lot. Some of these experiences felt a rightness, a fit. Others felt a wrongness, a pinch. Remember the story of the yoke. Which experiences chafed, pinched, irritated you? And which were like the soothing ointment, the healing hands? And like the thumb exercise notice the feelings of rightness or wrongness inside yourself. It’s not about thumbs; it’s about your interior feeling of rightness-for-you. The Linn’s’ book Sleeping With Bread suggests a much simpler way of reviewing: What fed you today? What nurtured your truest self? The last step, conversation, calls us once again to take a leap of …faith. Maybe it’s God you’ll talk with. Creator/Father? Jesus? Holy Spirit? Perhaps you have a kind of ambassador, the memory of a person in your life to whom you are beloved, who knows you, and knows whatever the beyond is. This conversation is really between ourselves-in-time and our deepest center. Some of us name it God.
When we hear something beautiful, we naturally turn our heads toward it. We instinctively turn toward the source of our desire, as the still-blind newborn roots for the little bump that something delightful comes from. That it is called “breast” is not important. What is important is that eventually the child comes to know the source, and give it a name:Mom. If we root for what nourishes us, we will instinctively find the source, and we will name it. And we will come to know that Source, by whatever name we call it, and we will seek it. Among the cacophony of stimulations of the day, we will come to know which nourish us, and we will desire them.

The Source of that desire will lift us on its wings through Lent – and through life – lightening the burden as our weak wills struggle for a foothold.

Tomorrow: a glimpse of our truest self – the Transfiguration